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Wednesday, December 30, 2015

I rarely get out to the movie theater, but managed it this week. This
particular theater was newly renovated to feature big clean aisles and
large comfy recliners. Having grown up in the era when beautiful old
theaters were getting chopped up into cold, sticky-floored multiplexes
with a distinctly garage-like vibe, I have to say I like the new decor.

I
did not like the previews. And there were tons of them. Preview after
preview after preview. I used to love movie trailers, but every single
preview we saw was exceedingly loud and exceedingly violent, with
someone getting brutally attacked in every one. Sitting there began to
feel like being assaulted. "This is why I don't go to the movies
anymore," I thought. I don't know why we had such violent previews,
since the movie we had come to see (The Big Short) was not violent. Maybe most movies are just like that now.

Anyway,
once the beatings and shootings (and a bear attack) were over, we got
to watch mayhem of a different sort: bloodless, cerebral, global. The Big Short follows the adventures of the money men who foresaw, and cashed in on, the 2008 housing-market debacle.

As
a writer, I was fascinated by the line the filmmakers had to walk.
Normally, in a movie like this where the main characters are taking huge
risks in the face of a lot of naysaying, you root for the main
characters. But in this case, rooting for the main characters meant
rooting for the collapse of the housing market and the economy. It meant
hoping for a disaster that caused much suffering in real life,
suffering that many in the audience have endured. At least the movie
acknowledges this: even the characters who profited were squeamish about
it. What keeps us from hating them is that the people they were betting
against were so much worse: creating and propping up a set of appalling
deceptions, careless and heedless of where it was all leading, and smug
in their belief that the glory days could last forever.

Another
challenge the filmmakers had was creating suspense in a situation where
we all know how it turned out; we all know what happened. In this case,
the suspense was in not being entirely sure which of the characters
would come out all right, or when, or how. It was in trying to
understand how this fiasco could happen in the first place. And that
leads to another difficulty: explaining complicated financial deals to a
general audience.

Here, the movie uses an interesting device
that could have backfired (it could've turned out condescending, or
boring), but really seemed to work: having celebrities explain
complicated financial concepts with simple, concrete analogies. Anthony
Bourdain, for example, compared the repackaging of bad debts to a chef
tossing leftover halibut into a fish stew: take your
less-than-attractive product and put it in a pretty new vehicle. These
explanations were also used very sparingly, just a few times, and
exactly at the right places. So, IMHO, it mostly worked (although having
Margot Robbie in a bubble bath while she explained her bit was a little
too gratuitously cheesecakey for my tastes).

I have always been partial to anatomy-of-a-meltdown movies (quite literally, in the case of The China Syndrome),
so maybe this was just my kind of movie. But with its dark humor and
extreme relevance--economic bubbles seeming destined to recur--it may be
many people's kind of movie. I hope so. Aside from the subject of the
movie itself, I also liked watching it as a writer, and seeing how the
filmmakers turned this unlikely subject and unlikely group of characters
into something eminently watchable.

Saturday, December 26, 2015

"I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may
be sometimes not to expect to produce anything .... I am still pursued
by a neurosis about work .... A day where one has not pushed oneself to
the limit seems a damaged damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most
valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it
rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room, not try to be or do
anything whatever."--May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

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you're moved to donate (as I will be doing) or start a blog challenge
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the word, and happy holidays!

Saturday, December 19, 2015

I said I couldn't do a "best books of 2015" post, but I thought I'd
share a few of my memorable reads from this year. Note that these are
books I read in 2015; most of them were not published in 2015. I'm lucky
if I can get to a book within a decade of its publication.

These
three memoirs/essay collections cover a variety of topics. Daum and
Julavits cast wide nets, discussing various aspects of their lives.
Esposito focuses on the challenges and rewards of running a farm in the
middle of a city. I particularly like the way Julavits handled time in
her book: the pieces are not arranged chronologically (they jump back
and forth in time), but they are meant to be read in the order in which
they are presented.

Love: A Philadelphia Affair, by Beth Kephart.Let's Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell.Devotion, by Dani Shapiro.

Kephart
presents short pieces on Philadelphia; even if you don't know
Philadelphia, you can appreciate these slices of urban life. Caldwell's
account of her friendship with writer Caroline Knapp covers so much
territory: friendship; solitude and introversion; rowing; the bonds
people make with pets; alcoholism; loss. (Be warned: Caldwell's book was
also one of the few books that has ever made me cry.) Shapiro pursues
the spiritual while touching also on family ties, on what it means to be
a parent and a daughter.

Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast.Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn, by Amanda Gefter.

Speaking
of parents: they figure prominently in Chast's graphic (i.e.,
illustrated) memoir on dealing with her parents' end-of-life issues, and
Gefter's search for, oh, nothing more than the key to the Universe (a
search sparked by, and shared with, her father). Both books are funny
while dealing with extremely serious issues. Gefter's book came closer
than any other book ever has to explaining physics and cosmology at a
level I could (mostly) grasp.

These
books deserve to be in the canon of feminist literature, and I suspect
they are or soon will be. Gay's book covers a wider range of topics.
Recommended for anyone who wonders why feminism, or why we needed a
Third Wave, or for anyone who already knows but wants like-minded
company and a view of what's next.

This One Summer, by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki.Backlash, by Sarah Darer Littman.Prisoner B-3087, by Alan Gratz, based on the story by Ruth and Jack Gruener.

Backlash is
a YA novel, a fast and compelling read, about bullying in the online
era. The inciting event--a miscommunication--was so realistic, as was
the non-sugary but satisfying ending. Littman explores some very nasty
goings-on from multiple points of view, making it easier to understand
the characters' motives even when we find them appalling. The other two
are more "tween" books, This One Summer a stunning graphic novel about family, loss, and growing up; Prisoner B-3087 based on the true story of a teen who survived ten concentration camps in World War II.

Five Days at Memorial, by Sheri Fink.The Crazy Iris, ed. by Kenzaburo Oe.The Shelf: Adventures in Extreme Reading, by Phyllis Rose.

Fink's account of a New Orleans hospital during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has stayed with me, as have the stories in The Crazy Iris
(about the aftermath of nuclear bombings). Both are emotionally tough
but rewarding and thought-provoking. And on the lighter side, Rose's
account of reading through a shelf of library books is likely to delight
any big reader or book lover.

Disclosure: Beth Kephart is a
friend, and I've had friendly conversations with Sarah Darer Littman.
Nic Esposito's press published one of my short stories. Nevertheless, my
recommendations here are based purely on my views as a reader. All
books listed here, I either bought or checked out of the library.

Thursday, December 17, 2015

I once read an essay that was ostensibly about grief, but as I read it I
suspected that what the author had really done, via several kinds of
self-destructive behavior, was to avoid grieving. For me, this
essay--which came highly recommended--missed the mark, because
ultimately I didn't think it was about what the author thought it was
about. We didn't have that meeting of the minds that is usually such a
satisfying part of reading, especially reading memoirs and personal
essays. (And I want to be clear that my issue here is not how the author
chose to respond to the grief-inducing incident: her life is her life,
and I'm not particularly interested in approving or disapproving of her
actions. My problem was that the writing didn't lead me to the insights
that she meant to spark, but took me in a different direction, which was
suggested by the evidence but unexplored on the page.)

Similarly,
I'm almost finished reading a memoir in which alcohol hijacks the main
thread of the story. The author is trying to tell me one story, to share
one set of insights about his life, and yet I'm being distracted by the
huge role that drunkenness plays in the events. And it's frustrating
that, for all the soul-searching and life-interpreting the author does,
he only grazes the surface of the alcohol topic. In this book, drinking
is like a Chekhovian gun that is never fired: present throughout, but
never examined.

I don't mean that, in this case, the author must
run to an AA meeting and tell us all about it. I mean that since
drinking plays such a huge part in his story, it should be dissected
with the same care as the memoir's other main threads--no matter what he
concludes about it, or even if he concludes he's not ready to conclude
anything yet. That territory should be explored.

One of the
difficulties of the memoir and the personal essay is that we don't
always see ourselves the way others see us; we're not always ready to
face or acknowledge the elephant in the room. I can empathize with these
writers as people, but as a reader engaging with their work, I want
more.

Monday, December 14, 2015

I was trying to remember if celebrity-authored picture books were A
Thing yet when I was growing up. I don't think so; I can't recall any
celebrity children's books back then.

I would've found it odd to
link authorship with a recognizable celebrity, since I'm not sure I even
thought of authors as contemporary people. Fairy tales and myths and
Aesop's fables seemed to be stories repeated for generations, with no
single recognizable author. They just sort of materialized. And I viewed
most books for children similarly: Make Way for Ducklings and Charlotte's Web and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
also seemed to have always existed. I was aware that some books had
authors' names on them, but those authors didn't seem like real people.
"Dr. Seuss" sounded like a made-up character (and indeed, it was a
pseudonym); I had never heard of such a name as "Roald" (Dahl) before
(and neither had my classmates, which was why they persisted in calling
him "Ronald"). E.B. White hid behind those mysterious initials. Louisa
May Alcott and Mark Twain (another pseudonym!) and L. M. Montgomery were
more accessible--their works carried more than a whiff of
autobiography--but still, they had lived a long time ago, way back in
olden times. Once Upon a Time.

As I got older, I became aware
that authors were real people, many of whom were even still alive. And
yet, they didn't seem like people you could run into at the grocery
store or the bus stop. If pressed to imagine where they lived, I might
have guessed they all lived up on a special mountain somewhere, or in
cabins out in the woods. Well, maybe not Judy Blume--the suburban
setting of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret was so familiar
she might have been living in my own neighborhood. Except I was pretty
sure she wasn't, because again, authors didn't live among boring people
like me.

To me, authors were celebrities in their own right. They
didn't usually appear on TV, but their names were IN PRINT. On shelves
in public places such as LIBRARIES and BOOKSTORES. What more proof of
fame could one need?

Of course, now that I am an author, all of this is hilarious to me. I am not remote or legendary, and I don't even get to spend most of my day writing.

With
authors on social media and doing school visits nowadays, I doubt that
children today think of authors as distant and mysterious, the way I
once did. That's okay. But my old imaginings are good for a chuckle!

Thursday, December 10, 2015

For a long time now, I haven't made a big deal about the turn of the
year. January 1 never brought many changes, and I didn't want to add
resolutions to my overcrowded schedule. For several years, my only
resolution was to try to do less, to slow down, in the new year.

2015
has been a year of changes--to be honest, most of them unwelcome. It's
been a year of letting go of many things, including expectations.

But
the upside of that is that there's now room for new things in my life.
I'm thinking about 2016, about writing goals and personal goals. Not in a
to-do list way, not in a way that will instantly fill my schedule back
up. I'm thinking about what else I'll be letting go of, and what new
things I'll be trying. I'm checking my priorities.

Mostly, I just
want to face 2016 with a spirit of openness, willingness. I don't want
to plan everything out now; I just want to be available for
opportunities as they come. I want to continue to make room for what
matters most.

Sunday, December 6, 2015

This passage from May Sarton's Journal of a Solitude pretty well describes the landscape here right now:

"I
look out at trees leafless now except for one maple, where high up
against the blue there is still branch after branch of translucent warm
gold. The leaves sift down one by one like notes in music."

Friday, December 4, 2015

Once you start writing for publication, an expectation and a pressure
can develop, to find a market for everything you write. (This is
obviously and especially true if writing becomes your main source of
income.) This expectation and pressure can be invigorating. I know that I
found it inspiring when I got my first book contract. I was extra
motivated by the increased certainty of an audience.

At other
times, the expectations of an audience--whether a real or hypothetical
audience--can interfere with the process, tilting a writer away from the
story she's telling and toward approval seeking, second-guessing,
belittling.

Lately, I've found it useful to pursue separate
categories of projects: some intended for publication, others just for
me. With the latter, I don't have to please anyone but myself. I don't
have to be perfect, or even finish. I can try anything, explore
anything. It's utter freedom, and reminds me why I write in the first
place.

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

We all need sources of comfort, ways to refill the well. Creating is an
act of affirmation; it takes energy, belief, a sort of optimism.
Speaking up takes energy, especially when it takes so much for a single
voice to be heard in this large world. That energy needs replenishment.

What is the wellspring you draw on? From where do you draw your strength?